Section 37
How Mumbai's dabbawalas deliver without technology
How can a low-cost team deliver lakhs of items on time every day without computers?
- case
- Success
- years
- 2010-2014
- Up to 250,000
- Lunches delivered per day · 2014
- 01
The situation
Every working day, Mumbai's dabbawalas pick up home-cooked lunches and deliver them to offices across the city, then return the empty boxes. The World (PRI) reported in 2014 that they deliver up to 250,000 lunches a day, and the boxes carry very little written information.
- 02
The decision
Instead of adopting costly technology, the system relies on simple codes on the boxes, fixed routes and the suburban train timetable. Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke, who studied it, said the railway forces the whole organisation to run to a rhythm. The Harvard case on the system describes it as achieving very high service performance (Six Sigma equivalent or better) with a low-cost, simple operating system.
- 03
The outcome
The dabbawala system became a Harvard Business School case (9-610-059) used to teach operations. Thomke told The World that the dabbawalas hardly make mistakes and that their secret is the system, not technology.